Good Monday everyone.
All in all, a decent weekend for Arsenal. I watched Match of the Day yesterday and was taken aback by Man City’s draw with Nottingham Forest. Yes, I know, that’s football. Some days you have opportunities and they just don’t come in, but still. I was a bit crazy.
How do you class something like Erling Haaland hitting the ball over the bar from 6 yards out? When a striker has scored so many goals in a season it’s hard to criticize him, but isn’t it as big a mistake as the goalkeeper missing one of his hands? Maybe there’s no right answer, I’m just glad he altered his lines.
Behind them, Man Utd keep winning. I know we’ve had a bit of a tough run in recent weeks, but against the background of United’s form with eight wins in the last eleven Premier League games, our win over them looks all the more impressive. And potentially important. They may have played a game more than us, but the difference is now only five points. This is not a two-horse title race, there is a third runner. In fact, an old family horse.
What other thing? Well, now that the dust has settled and we’ve taken three points from Villa, can we talk about the treatment Bukayo Saka continues to receive? On Saturday, just before halftime, he was at the end of a nasty sneaky foul from Coutinho. If you watch the replay, you can see him do a very quick ‘scissors’ with both feet, jumping at Saka’s ankles from behind.
The Arsenal man reacted, which I was happy to see because I feel like part of the solution to this is to be perceived as a player who doesn’t just take the kicks. However, in the subsequent pushes, Saka ended up with a yellow card, while Coutinho was left without a card. The clever thing about this foul was that early in the half, Saka was spiked into the back of his Achilles tendon, so badly that his boot flew off and the referee kept playing. Coutinho knew that he was in pain there and attacked him again.
When you see Michail Antonio booked for a ‘foul’ on Harry Kane where he literally didn’t touch the man, you have to ask questions. I will say that he has been a bit better lately compared to Saka, and when asked about this earlier in the season, part of Mikel Arteta’s solution was to modify the way he receives the ball. We’ve minimized the number of times he launches completely with his back to the defender, making it harder for that defender to run through him with impunity.
However, it’s not always possible, and the incident I mentioned in the Villa game was one of those. The ball broke, the defender caught it, it should have been a free kick. A simple decision. No one is asking for the player to be sent to Siberia, these things happen, but letting them go with nothing just encourages players to be more physical. At some point, one of these crunches on Saka, one of the best players in England, will really hurt him, and every Arsenal fan will be like ‘We told you this was going to happen’.
When asked about it afterwards, Arteta said:
He got kicked around quite a bit again, but he’s going to have to deal with it, not every week, but every three days. Sometimes also in training. It’s his game: teams aren’t stupid and they want to stop him. We have to protect it.
And when asked if he needs more protection from officials, he said:
We will discuss that. We will look at the images again and report it if necessary.
Please report it. This is an ongoing problem and given Saka’s increasing importance to this team, it’s hard not to worry. I realize it’s the nature of the beast to a degree, Saka isn’t the only skilled attacking player who is at the end of challenges ranging from desperate to deliberate to try and stop it, but when kicked from one pillar to another, then Roundly booed by opposition fans, the ingredients are there for the refs to bake their cake of nothing and inaction week after week.
It happens in the Premier League. It happened in the Europa League. It happened in the World Cup. As I said before, he was happy to see that Saka let the opposition know that he was not going to accept it, and he was happy to see that the Arsenal players immediately backed him.
No doubt that will lead to another charge from the FA for failing to control our players (we’ve had more charges for that this season than Sp*rs have had trophies in the last 60 years), but if Saka doesn’t get any protection from the referees, then their teammates can contribute their grain of sand. He got the last laugh this weekend, his glorious goal contributing to an Arsenal victory, but there is an inequality in terms of refereeing that is obvious and problematic. If the club can do their part to highlight that, even in private, then I think they should. It’s not about asking for special treatment, it’s just about fairness.
Only the England captain gets special treatment.
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Right, that’s all for now. James and I will be recording an Arsecast Extra for you later this morning. Keep an eye out for calls for questions on Twitter @gunnerblog and @arseblog on Twitter with the hashtag #arsecastextra, or if you’re a member of Arseblog on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord. server.
We should have the podcast for you by lunchtime. Until then.
